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In order, then, to know what the Divine Mind is, we must
observe soul and especially its most God-like phase.
One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man
from the body- yourself, that is, from your body- next to put
aside that soul which moulded the body, and, very earnestly, the
system of sense with desires and impulses and every such
futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal: what is left
is the phase of the soul which we have declared to be an image of
the Divine Intellect, retaining some light from that sun, while
it pours downward upon the sphere of magnitudes [that is, of
Matter] the light playing about itself which is generated from
its own nature.
Of course we do not pretend that the sun's light [as the analogy
might imply] remains a self-gathered and sun-centred thing: it is
at once outrushing and indwelling; it strikes outward
continuously, lap after lap, until it reaches us upon our earth:
we must take it that all the light, including that which plays
about the sun's orb, has travelled; otherwise we would have a
void expanse, that of the space- which is material- next to the
sun's orb. The Soul, on the contrary- a light springing from the
Divine Mind and shining about it- is in closest touch with that
source; it is not in transit but remains centred there, and, in
likeness to that principle, it has no place: the light of the sun
is actually in the air, but the soul is clean of all such contact
so that its immunity is patent to itself and to any other of the
same order.
And by its own characteristic act, though not without reasoning
process, it knows the nature of the Intellectual-Principle which,
on its side, knows itself without need of reasoning, for it is
ever self-present whereas we become so by directing our soul
towards it; our life is broken and there are many lives, but that
principle needs no changings of life or of things; the lives it
brings to being are for others not for itself: it cannot need the
inferior; nor does it for itself produce the less when it
possesses or is the all, nor the images when it possesses or is
the prototype.
Anyone not of the strength to lay hold of the first soul, that
possessing pure intellection, must grasp that which has to do
with our ordinary thinking and thence ascend: if even this prove
too hard, let him turn to account the sensitive phase which
carries the ideal forms of the less fine degree, that phase
which, too, with its powers, is immaterial and lies just within
the realm of Ideal-principles.
One may even, if it seem necessary, begin as low as the
reproductive soul and its very production and thence make the
ascent, mounting from those ultimate ideal principles to the
ultimates in the higher sense, that is to the primals.
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